A former member of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), an extremist group with close links to the military, is expected to tell a court in Chicago that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officers were complicit in the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, reported The Guardian.
The key witness in the hearing will be David Headley, an American-Pakistani LeT militant who has already told Indian intelligence services that he carried out the surveillance for the Mumbai operation while working for the ISI. A report on Headley’s interrogation last June by Indian investigators obtained and published by the Guardian in October revealed that the 51-year-old double agent gave his questioners a detailed picture of close co-ordination between at least lower-ranking officers in the ISI and the LeT militants.
Headley claimed that he was trained by an ISI non-commissioned officer in clandestine techniques and that he kept his handler – named as Major Iqbal – up to date with planning for the raid. The ISI also provided training and facilities to the attack team as well as funding his own surveillance operations, said Headley, who changed his name from Dawood Gilani. American prosecutors have now indicted Major Iqbal along with three senior members of LeT and an American alleged to be involved with the group, The Guardian says.
Headley, a former bar manager who was arrested in October 2009 in Chicago while returning from Europe, has since co-operated with US authorities in return for a reduced sentence. In the secret report, Headley is said to have told the Indian investigators that he was recruited by the ISI in 2005 and his handler had expressed enthusiasm when told which targets had been chosen for the Mumbai operation. Headley said too that he had informed his ISI handler about his involvement in operations that breakaway LeT factions planned to launch in Europe.
The only man named in the recent American indictment who will be on trial in Chicago is Tahawwur Rana, a Chicago-based immigration consultant who is charged with material support of terrorism. He denies the charges against him. Two weeks ago the Guardian revealed that the ISI had been categorised with al-Qaeda, Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah and other militant Islamic groups in a 2007 ‘threat matrix’ compiled to help interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.
The newspaper says the documents dating from 2002 to 2005 warned that the assistance to insurgents fighting western troops was thought to be the work of rogue ISI operatives. From 2006, there are no such caveats as US analysts appear to have decided that assistance for some militant factions was an official policy. The trial comes at a critical time with relations between Islamabad and Washington at a new low following the death of Osama bin Laden.
According to the newspaper, the hearings could acutely embarrass the ISI, which is suspected by many in the US and elsewhere of protecting the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It is also likely to fuel pressure in the US to slash the financial aid to Pakistan.